Watching President Obama today explaining and defending his budget, both the substance and the politics, I was struck by the question: could any of the possible Republican candidates out there do this?

Does any one of them have the precision of mind, the command of recall, the orderly process of thinking and evaluating, the reasonable moral compass?

You can play this game, too. Think it through. Throw those names and faces onto your mental viewing screen and think deep. Romney, Huckabee, Palin, Bachmann, Barbour, Santorum, Gingrich -- is there one of them we think could do what Obama can do?

I’ve been in close quarters with the president twice. The first time I came to the conclusion that this guy ought to be president of the United States. There’s a peace to his presentation, a calm understanding of the information, of his values, of the world.

A look at the Republican field, with all its negatives, I look at Nate Silver’s numbers and see the problem that the party has in finding someone to field against the president -- someone who can stand up on the same platform, talk the issues with this competence and wonder -- then it come to me, that they may not be in the business of looking for something with the match to Obama, simply someone to attack him. I’m talking about a protest candidate -- someone who is -- who yells at the government, mocks the country’s condition, is clever, sarcastic, and when it works best, cute in their cutting.

A look at the joke-telling at last week’s Conservative Political Action Convention, a look at the new poll showing a majority of Republican voters don’t believe the president was born here, even though it was announced in the newspapers at the time. I look at the strange wackiness that echoes through the one stable party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, and Ike, and wonder if they accept any of those guys today? Do you think they’d take a guy who wanted to take away states` rights? Who wants to fight for conservation of our wilderness lands, who wants to build an interstate highway system or create a federal system of loans and grants for higher education?

Forget about it, they’d never pick those guys. No, The Republicans aren’t that party anymore. They’re becoming more and more the party that doesn’t believe in science, whether it’s evolution or climate change; doesn’t believe in government; doesn’t believe the president is an American.

It’s veering off to being the party of the John Birch Society, adhering to the white parchments of that society’s latter day apostle, Glenn Beck. That’s right -- the John Birch Society that said Ike was a communist; the apostle who now believes that President Obama is an avatar of a burgeoning world-dominating caliphate.

That’s HARDBALL for now. Thanks for being with us.

The Birch Society has long been considered wacky and extreme by old guard conservative leaders. William F. Buckley famously denounced the John Birch Society and its founder Robert Welch in the early 1960s as “idiotic” and “paranoid. ” Buckley’s condemnation effectively banishing the group from the mainstream conservative movement. Welch had called President Dwight D. Eisenhower a “conscious, dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy” and that the U.S. government was “under operational control of the Communist party.” Buckley argued that such paranoid rantings had no place in the conservative movement or the Republican party.

Two years after Buckley’s death, the John Birch Society is no longer banished; it is listed as one of about 100 co-sponsors of the 2010 CPAC.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has listed the John Birch Society as a group that “advocates or adheres to extreme anti-government doctrines.”

Right-wing conservatives align themselves with the banking oligarchy, which has facilitated massive transfer of wealth to the ultra-rich.

They are for no taxes on business or the wealthy, elimination of Medicare, privatization of Social Security, abolition of unions, elimination of the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, elimination of all regulatory agencies, including those that guarantee food, product and banking safety and abolition of social programs of any kind, which they believe are socialistic.

MSNBC Rachel Maddox expose on the Birchers

Those spending billions to fund the Tea Party, like the billionaire Koch Brothers, are aligned with John Birch Society. JBS advocates the abolition of income tax, and repeal of civil rights legislation, which it sees as being Communist in inspiration. They want to eliminate the Federal Reserve, the Department of Education and most of the Federal Government, with the exception of those parts of the government funneling $670 billion into defense spending annually, which includes $117.8 billion dollars to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this year.

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